Buttons - Presidential Campaign - 1968

Nixon's The One!

OK, this isn't really a button, it is more of a badge thing you clipped over your shirt pocket. As I recall I found this on the ground somewhere in Olympia during the '68 campaign, so apparently this sort of "pin" didn't work all that well. The flip side says "ABCraft Mfg. Co. Chicago."

Those of us who felt Nixon was behind the Watergate break-in used this slogan a few years later when discussion turned to who was responsible for the crime.

Phone photo 1609

An aging James Abbott mural in McCleary, Washington depicts a merchant at the McCleary Eyeball Store

When I was a kid in McCleary I recall you could buy a decent eyeball for only 50 cents,  but those darn federal regulations came in with Nixon and before we knew it, eyeballs were no longer obtainable by us normal folk. And another local business went under. My memory tells me blue was more popular than brown.

There was also a McCleary Spleen Store, but I do not believe that has been celebrated as part of a historical mural.

Favorite Movie Quotes: Nixon

Nixon talks to a portrait of JFK: "When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are."

[Reviewed in Cheaper by the Dozen 41]

And yes, I actually do have an autographed copy of Six Crises signed by Tricky Dick when he was running for Governor of California in 1962. He was apparently up here for the Seattle World's Fair (Century 21 Exposition) around that time so maybe that's how a copy came to be found in a local used book store in the 1970s.

Much to my horror as an old 1972 McGovern volunteer, I discovered some years ago Nixon and I are probably distant cousins connected through the Trimmer family of New Jersey and then Ohio.

Phone photo 1329

A creative place to situate the hole in this LP of Nixon's speeches.

Favorite Movie Quotes: Frost/Nixon

"You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies, it diminishes great, complex ideas, stretches of time. Whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot. At first I couldn't understand why Bob Zelnick was quite as euphoric as he was after the interviews, or why John Birt felt moved to strip naked and rush into the ocean to celebrate. But that was before I really understood the reductive power of the close-up, because David had succeeded on that final day, in getting for a fleeting moment what no investigative journalist, no state prosecutor, no judiciary committee or political enemy had managed to get-- Richard Nixon's face swollen and ravaged by loneliness, self-loathing and defeat. The rest of the project and its failings would not only be forgotten, they would totally cease to exist."

Favorite Movie Quotes: The Falcon and the Snowman

Christopher Boyce, a good Republican son of a FBI man as he was watching the 1974 House impeachment hearings on President Richard Milhous Nixon:

"I don't care what these people say, this man is innocent!"

Boyce was later convicted of selling classified information to the Soviets.

[Reviewed in Cheaper by the Dozen 24]

1968: RFK vs. Nixon

I ran across this political cartoon I drew in, I'm guessing, April 1968. Robert Kennedy throws away a LBJ voodoo doll as he races Nixon to the Capitol. The American eagle looks wary while Gene McCarthy has dug a hole to stop RFK.

Johnson had dropped out of the race in March 1968, Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968. I'm not sure why LBJ makes that 3rd Party reference since by April Gov. George Wallace of Alabama had already announced he was running under the American Independent Party banner.

The drawing is too big to scan in one swoop. But here it is in pieces.

Mad Hatters Tea Party International

From about 1971 to 1974, I teamed up with a bookdealer and cartoonist from Victoria, B.C. named John Newberry to form a political entity called the Mad Hatters Tea Party International. John was a couple years older than myself and we shared an interest in the role of comix in the political process.

As the MHTPI we created silk-screened posters, mimeo broadsides, and even an ad in the Daily Olympian. This particular broadside was printed on legal size paper using the same mimeograph machine I used to print Gimmie Comics # 1 in 1973.

Assorted Thoughts on Insanity : Ephemeral Comix, 1980-1982, pages 166-180

Assorted Thoughts on Insanity : Ephemeral Comix, 1980-1982, pages 16-30